In the Haze of Jet Lag, the Recollections of a Tourist

As I said in my final report on our trip to Egypt and Israel, I would consider myself lucky if half my facts were right. I was traveling as a tourist, not a reporter, and most of my impressions were recalled through an almost fatal case of jet lag.

Dr. Eugene D. Erman of Encino verifies my judgment that Middle Eastern wine tastes of vinegar. He recalls that 23 years ago, when he was staying in the Jordanian Inter-Continental hotel overlooking the divided city of Jerusalem, a bottle of wine came with a pop-bottle top, and a Frenchman in his group tasted it and spit it out in disgust. Dr. Erman’s mention of the Inter-Continental reminds me of a story told by two of our tour companions, a man and wife. It has the sound of an urban myth, but in this case it came to me from the principals.

In the labyrinthine bazaar of Old City Jerusalem they became separated. Each took separate cabs back to what they supposed was our hotel. We were staying at the Hyatt, but the man thought it was the Hilton. When he reached the Hilton he realized his mistake and told the driver to take him to the Hyatt. However, the driver insisted on giving him a tour of the Mount of Olives. The man said he did not want to go to the Mount of Olives. He wanted to go to the Hyatt. The driver took him to the Mount of Olives, and then to the Hyatt. The fare was $30.

Meanwhile, his wife had forgotten the name of our hotel and told the driver to take her to the Inter-Continental, which sounded familiar. (It happened to be the last hotel we had stayed in in Egypt.) When she arrived, she thought it didn’t look familiar, but thought maybe she was being let off at a side door. She asked at the desk for her room number and was directed to a certain room. When she got there an Arab opened the door. His entire family was inside. In time, (and in some disarray) she arrived at the Hyatt and joined her husband.

Lucy Harrison of Corona del Mar sends a diary kept by her sixth-grader Ann, which has a passage that explains in chilling detail why I didn’t choose to enter Cheop’s pyramid.

“Today we went inside this huge pyramid. . . . It was very hot and humid inside. We were in a line that was moving inch by inch. . . . We came to a very small, long passageway that led up a steep incline. There were people coming down as we were squeezing and crouching and trying to climb up. . . .”

At that point I would have been screaming, “Let me outta here!”

Barton H. Emmet of Santa Barbara recalls an even more traumatic experience in the pyramid. Back in 1928, when he was 9 years old and his father was naval attache at The Hague, his mother took him and his 11-year-old brother and 10-year-old sister to visit Egypt, with their tutor, Binkie. When they entered the Cheops inner passage they were accompanied by six Arabs. As they entered the king’s chamber, Binkie stumbled on a low step and sprained her ankle. Emmet’s mother fainted.

“There we were--three children, six Arabs who spoke no English, and mother unconscious on the floor. . . .”

At least, in 1928, there would have been no crowd of tourists to make things worse.

My older son Curt, who did a graduate year in geography at UCLA, advises me that I appeared to place Egypt in the wrong hemisphere. “For us who live in the Northern Hemisphere,” I wrote, “it is hard to understand that upper Egypt is south, and lower Egypt is north.” Of course, Egypt is several hundred miles above the Equator, entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. What makes southern Egypt upper, and northern Egypt lower, is the Nile, which flows north, unlike the Mississippi, and gives Egypt its identity.

Frank Butler of Santa Maria also applauds my Egyptian diet of bread, potatoes and beer. On their Egyptian tour he and his wife had one boiled egg and a piece of dry toast for breakfast, then stuck to bread and potatoes. “Stella beer filled the void, along with American Snickers. . . . After two weeks of this I was well, as was my dear wife, while the rest of our little group were at various times on the brink of death.”

But I’m still a jet lag zombie.